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“Teacher, teach thyself……….”
If you have been with me for the past few weeks, you’ve spent a few minutes reading the Daily Affirmations from my study of The Tenth Step:
“We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
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We had good reasons and motivations for this “working”. As we began the question was imposed:
Now that we were living clean and sober, how is it that we could find emotional balance? What were the methods by which we could live to a good purpose under all conditions of our daily affairs?
A premise immediately appeared to us. We would have to embark on a quest to continue our practice of regular inventory and personal analysis, specifically assessing our spiritual condition. It was being regularly aggravated by emotional hangovers; patterns of reactions that we found we really needed to change into responses instead. These knee jerk impulses, conditioned by years of damaging behavior patterns needed adjustment, if not replacement.

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Now clear to us, these errors had to be thoroughly scrutinized. Rigging-up an antenna to bring awareness in the onslaught of our problems was a good place to start. We would become more regular in recognizing our shortcomings when they occurred, even to the point of giving ourselves a heads-up when we sensed them coming onto us.
Living the “Victim Mentality” had to go. “Oh true”, there was no doubt that circumstances arose by which we were caught in life’s situational collisions, but seemingly fair or not, we would begin to seek a realistic solution by discovering what actually was wrong with us. Where was it that our emotional reactions of Pride, Fear, Anger, Jealousy and melancholy Sadness, (all largely self-imposed), needed to be mitigated into measured responses. As a result of this practice we would see it clearly. We were going to have to change.
Our first effort upon sensing these flair-ups was to calm ourselves. Mini-Breath Meditations were extremely helpful in bringing us to a more relaxed state by which we could ask ourselves those old questions we learned in our 4th Step; the template by which we turned our primordial instincts of reaction into reason:
- Who were we cross with or what were we upset about?
- How did we feel we had been slighted? Was it our pride or did we feel we were not going to keep what we had, get what we want or get caught at something?
- What was it that we were truly afraid of?
- How important was this brainstorm upon us,… really? Was it worth the emotional turmoil our conditioned reaction was putting us through?
These first two simple practices found us regaining control and brought us to a state of restraint. We controlled our pens (now our keyboards, lol) and our tongues (now our cellphone tirades :).
Low and behold, we discovered that slowly, through this steady practice, we were making change. In the course of days, weeks and months – a significant difference was possible.
Our Sixth Step adage came back to us: “Any person capable of enough willingness, honesty” and humility, that applied Step Ten on all of their faults – trying their level best to avoid reservations – indeed would come a long way spiritually in their path towards finding contentment.
We were learning to precede our usual “Tasmanian Devil-like Flair-ups” by stepping back and thinking first!
Adopting this new attitude was well-aided when we began remembering that others are having just as hard a time as us in this quest for emotional balance and control; although we might have regularly thought prior to this effort that we were victims of their intentional disrespect, malice and carelessness we discovered:
“All people, including ourselves are to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong.” This allowed us to approach a response of true tolerance and patience, the essence of genuine love for our fellow man.
( quote: AA12x12 pg 92)
This question needed to be imposed for it was truly the Golden Rule of all times:
“Am I doing to others as I would have them do to me — at this moment”?
- Finally, we found that change by practice of Step Ten did not come overnight; that we would have to be patient and tolerant of ourselves, for “old habits die hard”. But, utilizing the Five P’s of Recovery helped us achieve our goals:
- Principles
- Practice
- Patience
- Persistence
- Prayer